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Orange Salad
Peel six oranges, scrape off all the pith, and cut them into slices. Take out the pips, put a layer of the slices on a dish, and sprinkle over them some powdered sugar and a little brandy or rum. Continue in this way until they are all used up, and serve. They may be piled in the shape of a pyramid. Oranges, French Style Cut six oranges into halves, remove all the insides, taking care not to injure the rinds; notch evenly round the edges of the rinds, and put them into cold water to soak. Squeeze out all the juice from the pulp, strain it into a saucepan, pour in water to make three gills in all, add one and one-half ounce of gelatine dissolved in one and one-half teacupfuls of water, also six ounces of sugar, the thin rind and juice of a lemon, and the whites and crushed shells of three eggs. Whisk well over the fire until the liquor boils, remove the whisk, put the lid on the pan, and boil slowly for ten minutes. Remove the pan from the fire, let it stand for five minutes, and strain through a jelly-bag until clear; wipe the orange peels perfectly dry, fill them level with the jelly, packing them in ice to keep them firm, heap up on top one-half pint of cream beaten stiff, with one teaspoonful of crushed loaf-sugar and a few drops of vanilla; place a sweetmeat on the top of each, and serve on a dessert-dish.
Two dishes are run together here without a break: a simple macerated orange salad, then a filled orange-shell jelly. The second is the ambitious one, and nearly all the tricky measures belong to it.
- Where the second recipe startsThe line "Oranges, French Style" is a separate heading that lost its formatting. Everything from "Cut six oranges into halves" onward is the second dish.
- Gills and teacupfulsA gill is half a cup, so "three gills in all" means the strained juice topped up with water to 1 1/2 cups. A teacupful is not a fixed measure in this period; sources put it somewhere between about a half and three-quarters of a cup, so the gelatine is dissolved in roughly a cup of water. The figure is loose and the total liquid is what matters.
- Gelatine strengthAn ounce and a half of 1896 gelatine is not an ounce and a half of modern powder. Today's granulated gelatine sets about two cups of liquid per quarter-ounce envelope, so this quantity would give a rubbery block. Judge by total liquid rather than copying the weight.
- The egg-white raftThe whites and crushed shells are there to clarify, not to enrich. Whisk only until the liquid comes to a boil, then stop and leave it undisturbed for the ten-minute simmer; stirring afterwards breaks up the coagulated raft and clouds the jelly. Strain through a jelly bag, a doubled length of muslin, or a coffee filter, and do not squeeze it.
- SugarsLoaf sugar was cut from a cone and crushed at home; use granulated. The "powdered sugar" of the salad means finely ground sugar without the cornstarch of modern confectioners' sugar, so caster or superfine sugar is closer.
- ChillingThe ice packing is only to hold the shells upright and set the jelly. A refrigerator does the setting; use a muffin tin or a bed of crumpled foil to keep the filled halves level until the jelly is firm.
- SweetmeatAny small candied item: a piece of candied peel, a glacé cherry, a sugared almond. It is decoration, placed on the cream at the last moment.
- The saladCut the oranges into rounds crosswise rather than into segments, and let the layered slices stand a short while so the sugar draws out juice and the spirit perfumes it; they soften if left much longer.
- YieldSix oranges serve six as a salad; the French-style version gives twelve filled halves, so two per person for six.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, and its dessert chapters lean heavily on the French repertoire that dominated American hotel dining. Jelly served back in its own hollowed rind was a standard trick of that repertoire, and it earned its place by looking difficult while using cheap ingredients: fruit, water, sugar, gelatine and a little cream. The clarification with egg white and crushed shell is the older confectioner's method, inherited from a time when gelatine was boiled down from calves' feet at home and often came out cloudy; by Oscar's day commercial sheet and granulated gelatine were widely sold, but the egg-white raft survived in print for a long time afterwards.